Scammers, stupidity: The dark side of the Web

Charles Seife is a pop historian who writes about mathematics and science, but his abiding theme, the topic that makes his heart leap like one of Jules Feiffer's dancers in the springtime, is human credulity.

In Sun in a Bottle (2008), he observed the scientists who chased low-temperature fusion down the rabbit hole. In Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (2010), he delivered his thesis in his first sentence: "If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it."

Seife's new book, Virtual Unreality, is about how digital untruths spread like contagion across our laptops and smartphones.